A channel of a flexible endoscope is a place, through which pass contaminants in organs, a body fluid such as mucus, blood and the like and pathogens and the like in a subject in the examination or in collecting a lesion tissue with an endoscope, and a place where definitive cleaning and sterilization are demanded. A long stainless steel wire equipped with a brush at tip has been generally heretofore inserted into an opening in the side at hand of each channel to manually brush for cleaning as a conventional method of cleaning the inside of a forceps channel, a suction channel and an air-supply and water-supply channel in an endoscope. There is also a method to use an automatic washing machine to drive a wire with a brush with a rubber roller instead of manual operation. (For example, see Patent Document 1).
Cleaning by a brush-equipped wire can realize a high cleaning effect when cleaned carefully, but it is required to that end to repeat an operation, in which the brush inserted into a channel is protruded through an opening at the tip of a channel to rub the brush with a finger in a cleaning liquid to remove contaminants remained and then pulled back to the opening in the side at hand to remove contaminants on the brush pulled out by similar operation, thus repeating insertion of the brush again to remove contaminants and then pullback. Accordingly, there has been a problem, in which this procedure takes time and an operator to perform the cleaning has a heavier burden. There has also been a problem, in which cleaning operation with a brush is only cursorily conducted, since preparation of a number of expensive endoscopes bears a heavy expense burden on the medical institution so that an endoscope used in a test is required to use for many occasions after cleaned and sterilized in as short a time as possible.
A method of using electrolytic water is practiced in cleaning an endoscope instead of cleaning with a brush in order to solve such problems. (See Patent Document 2, for example). In this conventional cleaning of an endoscope using electrolytic water, the electrolytic water with the same concentration of residual chlorine and water quality is used to clean and sterilize both the channel inside and the external surface of an endoscope.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication 2003-10116
Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Publication 2002-52033